[whateverman23]

The reason is pretty simple. As companies get larger, the culture dies.

Those who joined big-tech early-ish in their career likely see the state of the company at the time as way better than what they're used to. Then it gets worse.

It doesn't really matter where you enter in the history of the company, the culture is almost always going to be the best as you know it when you join and get worse over time. Very rarely does the opposite happen.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Enshitification affects all things (except, it seems, for the compensation of the CEO, for the that line only goes up).

[snapplebobapple]

On the contrary, higher CEO pay is a symptom of enshitification because it means ownership has dispersed enough and/or the majority owners have checked out enough that there's no strong hand slapping the CEO around when he proposes utter BS for his pay package. I did my undergrad econ final thesis on this subject almost 20 years ago now, it was quite interesting. Over 500k of total compensation a year correlated very heavily with a whole host of policies that indicate CEO board capture (Don't ask me what they were at this point, it's lost to the sands of time) and likely enshitification progression as well since the guys providing the capital have checked out and the CEO's interest is in increasing his comp, not in making sure the capital is well compensated.